About

Social Protocol Labs is an applied research and advisory firm focused on AI deployment in regulated financial environments.

Social Protocol Labs was founded in 2022 as a consulting and research firm focused on digital assets, risk management, and token-based financial infrastructure. As AI began reshaping financial services, our practice evolved to meet the problem we kept encountering from every direction: the gap between what AI systems can do technically and what regulated institutions can actually deploy. We now operate at that intersection—bringing the same rigor we applied to crypto risk and compliance to the challenge of AI adoption in banking, payments, and financial services.

Our engagements range from executive strategy briefings for senior leadership teams to hands-on implementation advisory for technology organizations deploying AI in regulated workflows. We are particularly focused on the challenges facing regional banks and financial institutions in the $10B–$100B asset range—institutions that need to compete with nationals on technology capability without their multi-billion-dollar budgets.

Rather than operating as a traditional consultancy or systems integrator, Social Protocol Labs focuses on first-principles research, working prototypes, and integration architecture for problems that do not yet have established industry patterns.

I was the designated CTO for Visa’s FedNow pilot—leading the technology team through the bid process, demo, and pilot engagements with the Federal Reserve in New York and Boston. Before that, I led the engineering team on Open VisaNet, Visa’s $200M initiative to migrate its mainframe transaction processing system to a distributed architecture handling upwards of $11 trillion in annual transaction value.

As Chief Systems Architect at Visa, I authored the Visa Token Service API specification—the flagship API powering Apple Pay, Android Pay, and Samsung Pay. I designed and delivered OPERA, Visa’s real-time operational monitoring platform, assembling a team of 15 engineers to ship it in six months. I led architecture for Visa’s Real Time Payments initiative, designing ISO 20022 compliant account-to-account payment services and representing Visa in national payment tenders across Canada, the UK, South Africa, the Nordics, and the Middle East.

After Visa, I co-founded Zenda, a healthcare fintech building tax-efficient HSA and FSA debit cards. I led engineering and platform architecture, negotiated scaled solutions with Galileo, Socure, and Braze, and navigated the regulatory intersection of healthcare and financial services. Zenda was later acquired by InComm Payments. Before that, I founded Fliplog, a digital publishing platform whose iPad apps were selected as Apple Staff Favorites, serving clients including NASCAR, Pearson, and Cambridge University Press.

I hold 3 patents in mobile payment security, a BS in Electrical Engineering from IIT Roorkee, and have over two decades of experience building and scaling financial infrastructure across payments, banking, blockchain, and digital assets. Today, the gap between what AI can do and what regulated financial institutions can actually deploy is where the hardest and most valuable problems live—and it’s where Social Protocol Labs focuses its work.

Social Protocol Labs operates through time-bounded advisory and research engagements designed to deliver clear outcomes:

• Direct engagement with the founder—every engagement is led by someone who has built and operated financial infrastructure at scale, not delegated to a team that hasn’t.
• Research-informed, practically focused—every recommendation is grounded in our active research and operational reality, not recycled industry reports.
• Designed for your existing infrastructure—we work with what you have, not what you wish you had. We’ve built inside large-scale financial infrastructure and understand the constraints.
• Honest about what works and what doesn’t—if AI isn’t the right solution for your use case, we’ll tell you. We’d rather lose a sale than damage our reputation.

We complement internal product and engineering leadership rather than replace it. We don’t operate as staff augmentation and don’t pursue open-ended retainers without defined outcomes.